Samsung R&D Institute Poland submission to WAT 2021 Indic Language Multilingual Task

Abstract

This paper describes the submission to the WAT 2021 Indic Language Multilingual Task by Samsung R&D Institute Poland. The task covered translation between 10 Indic Languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu) and English. We combined a variety of techniques: transliteration, filtering, backtranslation, domain adaptation, knowledge-distillation and finally ensembling of NMT models. We applied an effective approach to low-resource training that consist of pretraining on backtranslations and tuning on parallel corpora. We experimented with two different domain-adaptation techniques which significantly improved translation quality when applied to monolingual corpora. We researched and applied a novel approach for finding the best hyperparameters for ensembling a number of translation models. All techniques combined gave significant improvement - up to +8 BLEU over baseline results. The quality of the models has been confirmed by the human evaluation where SRPOL models scored best for all 5 manually evaluated languages.

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